5 Displacing the colonial milieu of post-WWI Egypt to the SF terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra, Stargate is the kind of cultural artefact that Edward Said asks us in Culture and Imperialism to interrogate. We can superficially appreciate Stargate as an innocent tale of good triumphing over evil-or even as a playful extrapolation of Erich von Däniken’s notion in Chariots of the Gods that the pyramids were built by aliens 4-but such allegories of liberation are deeply rooted in the long history of Western political and cultural intervention in the Middle East.
Awash with romantic images of big-scaleĮxcavations, gangs of native diggers, desert landscapes and an underlying faith in Western technological and cultural superiority, Stargate offers the pleasures of archaeological adventure, military spectacle and the morally satisfying conclusion that the forces of reason and justice have brought liberty to the benighted peoples of Middle Eastern ancestry. Jackson marries the chief’s daughter and teaches the people literacy and democracy. Sympathetic to the plight of their ‘living ancestors,’ Jackson and O’Neil lead a successful revolt against Ra. Jackson learns from hieroglyphs that the Nagadians are actually the descendants of ancient Egyptians, whom Ra had spirited away to Abydos to work his mine. They encounter a race of primitive humans called Nagadians, who are forced to mine an energy-rich mineral for an alien overlord appearing to them as the god Ra. Jack O’Neil (Kurt Russell) and accompanied by Egyptologist Daniel Jackson (James Spader) through the stargate to the distant planet Abydos. 3 The army sends an expedition commanded by Col. The stargate is the film’s central novum, an artefact excavated near Giza in 1928 that present day scientists ascertain is a device of extra-terrestrial origin that allows inter-planetary travel through artificial worm holes. government-to major geopolitical events in the Middle East.Ī survey of Stargate’s themes is necessary to contextualize the archaeopolitical thrust of its television offshoot. Its longevity can also be attributed in part to the ways it adapts the premise of Roland Emmerich’s feature film Stargate (1994)-the alliance of archaeological exploration with secret paramilitary operations by the U.S. Keywords: science fiction film and television, archaeology, geopolitics, Stargate, Stargate SG-1, archaeology-military complex, Second Gulf War, First Gulf War, colonialismįor its characters to explore.
The mercurial figure of Babylon offers a counterpoint to the film's overlay of archaeology and militarism, and indeed to the rhetoric of military stewardship at the heart of the "military-archaeology complex." The shifting representation of Mesopotamian antiquity in SG-1's ten-year run (1997-2007) offers powerful cultural criticism of the show's own premise. Just as archaeology passes from a source of wonder into a vehicle for military adventure, the show's ideological commitments to global (read intra-galactic) security become increasingly destabilized, particularly in the Mesopotamian-themed episodes aired after 9/11. But the shift to the small screen's televisual identity is symptomatic of the deepening complexities of representing geopolitical activity in the region. Aired in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, Stargate (1994) translates the colonial milieu of 1930s Egyptology to the science fictional terrain of Abydos and the battle against Ra. This chapter develops the central thesis of Chapter 1, namely that paramilitary archaeology is a means of invoking then containing dangerous pasts as an imaginative extension of U.S.